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1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
Good start!

One thing did stand out that bugged me though:

Fibre channel can run over copper or fibre. FCoE is actually fibre channel encapsulated in Ethernet frames and can also run over copper or fibre (or anything really that can carry Ethernet.)

Don't confuse FC with fibre optic cables.

Will re-read through the original post more and contribute tomorrow.

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1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
True; though if you're running gigabit you're more likely to get consistently better performance out of iSCSI over NFS. This is mostly due to how ESX 4.X+ handles MPIO to iSCSI LUNs.

That said, if you're not really hitting the limits of gigabit its a wash anyway.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
Generally something like video transcoding or rendering or anything of that sort will use 100% of the CPU resources you throw at it.

That said, if you went with the 6 core i7 you could give 4 vCPUs to the Ubuntu VM and run it 24x7 and still have enough CPU power to run your remaining 3 VMs (which I'd generally recommend you do with 1 vCPU each.)

What kind of load are you expecting on the remaining VMs? What kind of disks and how many?

quote:

(along with possibly even buying a dedicated pass-through'd GPU to handle decoding rather than relying on CPU)

What are you looking at to provide this functionality? Be wary of VMdirectPath and understand that not every device works perfectly with pass-through. It was generally intended to let you hook things like network cards, HBAs and disk controllers directly to virtual machines.

I do see here: http://vm-help.com/esx40i/esx40_vmdirectpath_whitebox_HCL.php

that someone has managed to get a couple Radeon boards to work with 4.X though. I'd presume it'll still work in 5.X.

Also, make sure you shop the HCL or research hardware before you buy. To boot ESXi you need a supported disk controller and a supported NIC or it will PSOD. If your NIC isn't supported it'll PSOD with an LVM error and you'll spend all your time beating your head against the wall troubleshooting your disk controller.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
VCD doesn't quite behave in the manner you're expecting it to. You could add your production VMs to VCD but it won't exactly be as straightforward as "snapshotting your production servers into dev."

You'd need to take a writable snapshot of your replicated datastores and present it to your DR cluster. Then you could add those VMs to the vcloud director catalog to be provisioned/managed.

That said, using your DR cluster as a dev site is a good idea.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Noghri_ViR posted:

So I'm basically in support hell right now. I've got VMware saying I'm having a Netapp problem and Netapp saying I have a VMWare problem. ARGH!!!!!! So what's happening is that for some reason my NSF shares seem to disappear for a bit. For example:


Is what happended last night. Now this only started happening after I upgraded to 5.0, everything was running perfectly on 4.1. VMware's first response was to webex in, take a look and immediately assign blame on Netapp and said I had to open a trouble ticket up with them. I just shrugged and did as I was told.

Netapp was much more thorough and mead me generate an autosupport and we went through the log files. We didn't find any network disconnect and nothing to indicate that the the shares were being shut down.

Next we created a new NFS share on the other interface and moved some of the more heavy I/O intensive VM's over there and surprise surprise I didn't have any lost connections with that share. After running a few other support tools I was passed back off to VMware.

Now my VMware support person is trying to blame the network despite my monitoring tools showing no downtime and the log files from our procurve showing nothing to indicate there is a problem. Has anyone had a problem like this since upgrading to 5.0? Anyone have any ideas?

Our of curiosity, have you verified you're using a consistent MTU from ESXi all the way through the network to the filers? Had a similar issue to this at a customer site that boiled down to an MTU mismatch.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
If I'm using 10gbe then I'll use the vDS and NIOC to manage traffic since I'm sharing the two 10 gig uplinks among all my different traffic. This of course assumes I'm not using something that lets me carve that 10 gig NIC into virtual NICs. If I am then I just create a pair of NICs for management traffic and if applicable storage to put on standard vSwitches.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Rhymenoserous posted:

I think he wants a big VMFS partition, but those aren't supported above 2TB.

ESXi 5.X supports SCSI devices over 2TB though individual virtual disks are still limited to 2TB-512B.

A single 64TB VMFS filesystem is also possible in 4.X though you need to use 32 2TB extents to create it.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

nahanahs posted:


Do you know where I can read about setting up extents? This is a new concept for me. I'm not sure if I do something with a single or multiple virtual disks and then install or what.
The real key for me is getting a setup with both some kind of redundancy and using as much disk as I can. We're big on burning a candle at both ends and then wondering why it melted.

Extents are just one of many ways you can grow a VMFS filesystem. Extents are not a means of making 1 big monster VMDK so you'll still end up creating a bunch of 2TB VMDKs and slinging them together with LVM. Since this is undesirable to some then your best bet is to use a physical mode RDM with whatever fancy features your storage supports to grow the device.

If you tell me more about your problem and what you're trying to do to solve it I could probably provide more help.

Doc link; hopefully this works:
http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/index.jsp?topic=%2Fcom.vmware.vsphere.storage.doc_50%2FGUID-8AE88758-20C1-4873-99C7-181EF9ACFA70.html

Not sure if this is exactly what you want though.

Basically extents are concatenation; once the first device fills up it starts to spill into the second device. The positive is you get another LUN queue to send data to but the negative side is now you've got two separate devices with one filesystem spanned over it. If you do this and use storage replication you'll need to make sure the LUNs are in the same consistency group (EMC term)/volume (netapp vernacular) to make sure they're replicated at on the same schedule.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Corvettefisher posted:

Well as long as you nesting it the upper OS shouldn't care/know

Its less a technology question and more a licensing terms question. That said the licensing should universally apply regardless of the actual hypervisor in use (unlike... say Oracle...)

If you're already on datacenter today then it looks like there's a bit of a price change, otherwise the terms sound basically the same. <5k to run as many windows VMs as you want on a 2 socket box.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Corvettefisher posted:

Does anyone here actively use SRM? Any gripes about it? So far it seems pretty amazing.

I've done a few deployments from <50 VMs to over a thousand. It has its high points but it also points out a lot of faults in your DR plan when you suddenly realize there are tools out there like SRM. I've also used it to help with larger datacenter moves.

I wish the scripting capabilities were a little more advanced and it does not give a poo poo about if the applications inside the VMs came up or not but it generally works reliably.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Corvettefisher posted:

How many of you all use the Oracles DB oppose to MS SQL for your vmware databases? So far most clients are MS SQL haven't and I seen any oracle DB's.

I've had 3 maybe 4 customers in the last 5 years VMware consulting actually run vCenter on Oracle.

quote:

Yeah. Our vhost blades have 192GB of memory with two sockets, and it's annoying to have to pay for enterprise plus licenses even though we don't use any the other fancy enterprise plus features

Are you actually using up to 192GB per blade today? If not you can probably hold off on buying the more expensive licenses.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
When I do that sort of things with customers I generally build logical diagrams and physical diagrams. Information about vSwitch configuration is stored in tables as is datastore information.

I generally have tables for the following:

Cluster Configuration
- HA settings
- Include things like heartbeat datastores and advanced settings (like DAS.IsolationAddress0-9)
- DRS settings
- DRS affinity and anti-affinity rules
- EVC settings

Per VM overrides would go into a separate table somewhere.

Datastores including information about the disks supporting them. Information like what storage array, what disks, internal LUN IDs (if applicable) and maybe things like snapshot intervals. Definitely things like replication.

vSwitch per host including NIC failover orders and a table listing all of the portgroups with VLAN IDs and a note about what sorts of things should go there. If using a vDS then you just need one big happy table for each vDS instead of one per host.

Any and all ESXi advanced settings.

Support information (including steps for grabbing the log bundles for your other people not as familiar.) This should include who to call and identifying information.

Licenses in a table.

vCenter alarms should probably go into a table with triggered actions.

Folders and resource pool hierarchy. These can be a pain in the rear end so you may be better off diagramming in visio and using transparent shapes or something to denote group/role levels of access.

That's the big things that occur to me off the top of my head. There are plenty of other things but that should give you an idea of the level of detail.

Anything you document you should write down why it's that way. This is tremendously helpful when you pay jerks like me to come on site and do an environment health check and I see horrible practices adopted. If there's a good reason I won't have to flag it red and have an uncomfortable conversation with your boss.

Really the best thing to do is sit down and think "if I walked into a new job tomorrow, what kind of poo poo would I need to see to know exactly what's going on."

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
I thought I would post this for the 3 of you out there actually running your vCenter database on Oracle and are about to upgrade from 4.1 to 5.0 update 1:

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2032277

You can also thank me for being the first guy to run into that bug and slog through it with VMware escalation engineering!

The short of it is don't upgrade from 4.1 to 5u1 if you're using Oracle for the vCenter database.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

three posted:

Why are you using Oracle for your vCenter database? :psyduck:

I'm not, customer is. They have absolutely zero licenses of MSSQL. It's either DB2 or Oracle here. I have a handful of customers in this camp that just won't budge either.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
If you have 2 VMs on the same host but different VLANs then the traffic will have to go out to some device to route the traffic from one VLAN to the next. If this device is a VM that's doing the routing it could stay in the host. Otherwise yeah it's going to go out to some real router on the network.

There is not a deep dive book for networking but with that said, what sorts of questions would you like to see answered? I can either point you at a resource or answer them for you. I ask because I'm looking for a side project and if there's enough demand then maybe a network deep dive post is in order.

Regarding your DB question; I prefer MSSQL because it's generally hassle free and I know next to nothing about Oracle. VMware has a small enough customer base on Oracle that I appear to have been the first person to hit a 4.1 to 5 update1 upgrade bug (for the record, going from 4.1 to 5.0 works fine.) I'd say in the last 5 years I've been doing this kind of work I've run into 3, maybe 4 customers running vCenter on Oracle.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

FISHMANPET posted:

Would the Cisco Nexus 1000V (or whatever their vSwitch replacment is) be able to do that?

On the other hand, I don't really know how much traffic there would be between VLANs that it would matter, but I'm sure I can partially blame our hosed up VLANs for it.

Unfortunately no. The 1000v does provide you an NX-OS virtual switch but it doesn't do any routing. You'll probably need to look at one of the virtual firewall solutions.

If you have an enterprise plus license today and you're using a distributed vSwitch you can turn on netflow (assuming you're also on 5) and point at some collector. This will start telling you what VMs are talking to what. It'll capture things like VM to VM traffic, VM to physical hosts and VM to internet. You can send all this data to something like NTOP or Netflow analyzer.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Corvettefisher posted:

thumb rule 1 vCPU per gig of ram, I do 1 vcpu:2GB ram. You can assing 12 vCPU's but when contention time comes because 5 people decided it would be funny to download COUPON TOOL BAR that runs all CPU's at 100% you are really going to be wishing you limited them. Not only that but the more RAM/CPU assigned to a vm will create more overhead. A 12 core CPU will not perform anyfaster for the end user if 8 of those cores are idle, the scheduler will issue a wait for those 12 cores though causing some performance loss across the host.

This isn't a rule of thumb at all...

Typically you allocate 1 vCPU unless you know for a fact your application needs and will use more than 1 vCPU. There is no magic formula of X CPUs per gig of RAM.

That said; the reason we don't assign 12 vCPUs to all VMs is that the rest WILL queue when one VM gets really busy. If you don't necessarily need to give the app 12 vCPUs to perform (maybe you only need 4?) then you will be better off assigning 4 vCPUs. This now means that for every 12 cores you can have 3 VMs running concurrently and will most likely get better overall performance out of the application.

Here is a fantastic read: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10131

It's for 4.1 but not a lot has changed with the VMware scheduler between 4.X and 5.X.

You'll know if things are going bad for you with assigning multiple vCPUs if you see %RDY climb and %CSTP climb in esxtop.

The short of it is the less vCPUs a VM has/needs the higher consolidation ratio you'll be able to achieve.

That 20%, can I get more context? Is it 20% of the total CPU resources in the system or is it 20% of one CPU core?

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Corvettefisher posted:

No it isn't on official thumb rule, but it is one I generally use in VDI deployments, it seems to work pretty well. But in general only assign what you need.

Stop using this rule, you're screwing up your consolidation ratio on a workload that traditionally rarely needs more than 1 vCPU anyway. You should be categorizing your users into a few buckets and then defining the VM specifications that support that bucket of users.

For example you might have helpdesk people who have an email client open and a web browser and you might have sysadmins who use visio and a few java tools.

Helpdesk peopleshould get 1 vCPU and maybe 2-3GB of RAM and the sysadmins MIGHT get 2 vCPUs and 4GB of RAM. Most likely they'll be fine with 1 vCPU and 4GB of RAM.

The more vCPUs you give a VM the less the number of VMs you can concurrently schedule. Unless your users are pegging out the 1 vCPU you've assigned you're just wasting resources/money.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

DevNull posted:

Also, I am going to be at VMworld tomorrow. I'll be wearing a blue button up with short sleeves and pink/white stripes. I have a giant octopus tattoo on my right forearm, so I am pretty easy to pick out of a crowd. Say hi, and I will give you all the good VMware gossip.

Going to be at the VMware booth in the solution exchange or out and about at various sessions?

If I see you I may stop over and offer you a beer.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Mierdaan posted:

I'm sorry, did I stress enough that a loving VMware tech recommended I update my NIC firmware by running the firmware update tool in a Windows guest VM?

Just use VMDirectPath!!

Not serious and I'm not surprised. VMware support has been very spotty lately.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

three posted:

Anyone here doing much with vCloud Director? If so, could you explain your use cases and thoughts? I'd love to hear what people are doing with it.

I do a lot of integrations of VCD in software development shops and QA. Normally I hear things like "I want to check code into SVN and have it automatically provision a VM and then we'll test it and throw the VM away."

I had another customer who's core product was an email security tool. They supported 2 versions of exchange and lotus notes and wanted to test clients from Windows XP, Vista and 7 with varying versions of said clients. We built a bunch of vApps that included Exchange, AD, the security server itself and a handful of client VMs and used vCloud Director's fencing so nobody had to worry about changing IPs or dealing with all these extra systems on the network.

Yet another customer actually put other orchestration tools in front of it and basically used it to roll out (with approvals, etc.) staging machines for various applications.

Overall there are a great many things I like about the tool. It's extremely extendable, particularly if you're familiar with things like vCenter Orchestrator. It can bring a whole mess of problems into your datacenter though if you aren't careful.

Pretty much anyone who wants a sandbox environment but you want to avoid having the 3000 test VMs that can be destroyed but no one can be bothered to do so. T

It also happens to be pretty decent if you're a service provider or if you want a RESTful front-end to your environment.

Any specifics you want to know?

quote:

Yes, IaaS, and on demand services. Don't you use it for IaaS or SP sales?

It really helps deal with the tickets that sales reps submit

Not sure what you're trying to say.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
Heads up regarding vSphere 5.1's SSO (which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who reads docs); it doesn't behave without a working forward and reverse DNS entry.

What I mean to say is it'll install and all the services will start and things will seem to work. You can add hosts, setup HA/DRS, setup datastores and otherwise think everything is fine. The problem crops up when you reboot your vCenter host and now the vCenter service won't start. SSO will be started but there won't be anything listening on port 7444 (the default SSO port), you'll see a shitload of exceptions in the SSO logs and most likely nothing in the discover-is.log.

I've tested and verified this 3 times now (twice with friends/customers and once again in my own lab.)

To sum up, make sure you have PTR and A records for your vcenter and SSO hosts or you will be made very sad.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
It was released and is now called "Workstation 9."

Next tech preview will probably show up shortly before the workstation 10 release.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

DevNull posted:

What the gently caress? That is probably left over from the days of it being really lovely and slow. I guess we need to find someone in charge of the docs and tell them to change that.

When you use VNC, are you doing it by enabling the VNC access to the VM though the vmx config, or from a VNC server in the guest?

It's still kind of lovely when you're not on the local LAN with the system and there are still occasionally character repeats. It is noticeably better in 5.1 though!

The web client lovely and slow though. Waiting several seconds for the client to figure out what actions I can do to an object gets really annoying really fast. The user experience in the thick client is much much better.

In my testing I've deployed the web client to a dedicated VM and have even tried giving it ludicrous amounts of resources and even with just 1 user logging in it is pokey as hell.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Mierdaan posted:

This is in 5.1?

I don't get VMware's approach to web interfaces in general. The Workstation WSX HTML5 tech gave me real hope for the future, and then vCenter 5.1 came around and BAM Adobe Flex crushing all my hopes and dreams.

Yeap, the web client in 5.1 (previous versions weren't even worth looking at/using). I know the post I quoted was with respect to the remote console but I figured I'd take the opportunity to bitch about the web client.

Unfortunately I believe none of the new features are actually exposed in the thick client so you're pretty much stuck having to roll out the web client.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
http://xtravirt.com/vsphere-client-rdp-plug-in

Right click VM--->open RDP. I believe this is kept up to date.

Problem solved!

As long as you don't click the console tab though. Those people drive me nuts..

edit: it's postgres.

edit2: fixed URL

1000101 fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Nov 1, 2012

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Erwin posted:

Are there any resources specifically on using vCloud Director for software testing environments that are Windows-based? Our test environment is 4 Windows VMs plus a dependancy on a spearate file server, and I assume if I were to make it into a deployable vApp that would get walled off from the production network, I'd need to include a domain controller.

I'm looking for some kind of step by step of someone who has done this. Eventually I'd like each of our developers to be able to fire up a clean test environment any time they want.

What specifically do they need from the external server? If they just need to copy files in then that should be fine. If they need to change things on the fileserver though that can complicate things.

Also yeah if you want them to join AD you'll probably want to toss a domain controller in there if your application actually needs it. One of my customer's actually don't need AD to do the software development so windows machines are just provisioned with local accounts and they're good with that.

I dunno if any resources specifically exist that are publicly available but I can certainly answer any questions you may have.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Corvettefisher posted:

Anyone else going to VMware Partner Exchange in Feb?

I try to go every year. One of my colleagues intends to do his VCDX defense there this year. That'll make two of us in one company which will be kind of rad.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Corvettefisher posted:

Nice if you are going would love to meet up, my teacher is debating going for his VCDX, just passed his DCD this week I plan to get my VCAP-DCA there if possible.

Sure why not. I generally hit up a bunch of different restaurants whenever I'm in Vegas. You're welcome to come along and bring friends.

Regarding your teacher, if he's planning to defend at PEX then he's got to have a design ready for submission before the end of the year. The defense portion isn't something you just cram for and hope for the best.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Number19 posted:

Yeah same here. I'm not running into vRAM entitlement issues so maybe I'll just hold off for a while.

5.1 sort of seems like it was really rushed.

I think the biggest joy I got from my customers about the 5.1 release was that vram entitlements were dead. Nothing else is really worth it unless you're building a new environment and intend to use vCloud suite features.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

vty posted:

I'm a VSPP and I'm still billed by vRAM. I was so happy about the change until they said it doesn't affect VSPP providers.

Anyone know if the VSPP program has ever not been RAM based? I host nearly all Exchange/MSSQL servers so the RAM is always high-reserve (store.exe, etc).

It's always been based on allocated RAM and features you provide for said VMs.

vty posted:


Vmotions taking forever...

What sort of app is the VM running if you don't mind my asking?

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

KennyG posted:

Should I be concerned if my integrator/rep still thinks that I need vSphere Ent+ since I wanted to have 192GB of ram per host?

I freely admit that I know next to nothing about vSphere or any virtualization issues, but I don't want to blindly follow some idiot who doesn't know what he's doing.

It's Dell, btw. (Fed Gov, before someone starts trying to poach buisness.)



Second question, can you virtualize your vCenter Server within your cluster? Is that a good idea?

Be mildly concerned they aren't up to speed on the new licensing terms from VMware.

Regarding your second question:

Yes that's fine. Recommend you create a DRS host affinity rule to pin vcenter to a couple of specific hosts so you know where to go when things go south. Also if you're connecting vcenter to a vDS make sure you use ephemeral binding for the vCenter server, it's database server and potentially at least 1 AD server.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

BnT posted:

Is anyone out there using IDS or IPS systems within your VMware environment? Specifically, is it possible to SPAN or port mirror traffic between two VMs even if they reside on the same host? I see that Sourcefire has this and wondering if it's possible without that substantial a budget. Would vDS and a Snort VM get the job done?

What IDS/IPS are you using?

You can't really SPAN a port unless you're using the functionality in the Nexus 1000v or the vDS since traffic between two VMs on the same host will never actually reach the physical switchport. You have options though! You can put an IDS VM on each ESXi host and make sure they don't vmotion (disable DRS for these VMs). Allow promiscuous mode in the vSwich/portgroup configuration and the IDS should be able to snoop all the traffic on that vSwitch in whatever portgroup it's connected to. If you need multiple portgroups then add multiple NICs/sniffers.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

evil_bunnY posted:

Repost from the cisco thread, since half the problem is virtualization-related. Maybe one of you guys has a clue.

I'm once again stumped by my Nexus'es unwillingness to do my bidding.

The problem is that I can't get my port-channels to some new ESXi hosts to get/stay up.

Config: (indentical on both switches)
[code]
Nex-One# sho run

interface port-channel11
description esx01-nfs
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allowed vlan 739
spanning-tree port type edge trunk
speed 10000
vpc 11

interface Ethernet1/11
description esx01-nfs
switchport mode trunk
switchport trunk allowed vlan 739
channel-group 11 mode active
...


You're using LACP with a standard vSwitch. This won't work.

Change to 'channel-group X mode on'

Also make sure the switch is configured for src-dst-ip assuming that actually exists on a nexus still. src-dst-ip-port (or whatever it is may also work.)

1000101 fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Feb 4, 2013

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Powdered Toast Man posted:

I got into a bit of an, uh, tussle with the other guys working on my production cluster and I was curious what the prevailing opinion is here:

Virtual disks...thin or thick provision?

My answer to this question is "What tool do you have to tell you that you're running out of space and do you actually pay attention to said tool?"

When customers ask me if they should do it on the array or in VMware I almost always respond with that. If you've got good monitoring in place and you actually listen to it you could theoretically be just fine doing thin on thin. That said most people I talk to don't even notice the storage views in the vSphere client and haven't even bothered to setup alarm actions to alert on reasonable thresholds.

Regarding VMware stunning a VM when a disk runs out growth room: it does that because it has no way of knowing if you care about the data on that vmdk. It's protecting you from potentially catastrophic data loss and you might come to appreciate that when some dickface out there reboots all the controllers on your storage array or fucks up your SAN zoning.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Frozen-Solid posted:

How do you get the Performance charts in VMware able to change the date/times, rather than just the real-time chart of the last hour? Or is that yet another feature I can't use without vCenter?

You can do this with vcenter because it stores that data over time. When it's just a standalone host there is nowhere to store the datapoints so you can't go back in history; just get realtime.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

three posted:

Semi-related to virtualization, but did anyone follow the VCE launch presentation this morning? They claim a billion dollar run rate, but have only sold 1,000 units. Am I way off on my math ($1mil/Vblock) or does that not make any sense?

Run rate is a projection anyway but it's very possible to hit that target. Lots of companies that buy 1 vBlock end up buying more and I believe they are going to be releasing/have released some lower cost options to pick up more volume.

1000101 fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Feb 21, 2013

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!
It's actually a pretty common cause of making hostd fall over and die.

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

Corvettefisher posted:

To any vExperts here, do you put it on your resume? I've been nominated by some people in my area.

This is an example of a question you shouldn't ever have to ask.

Anytime you receive recognition for your professional efforts it should go somewhere on your resume and in any cover letters you may send out. You can bet anyone competing for the same job would do the same. It's also another way to show value.

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1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

three posted:

The hardware detaching is cool, but how often does anyone need to use it? It'd be easier to just use auto deploy for ESXi hosts, and only bad people run physical workloads nowadays. (Plus who boots Windows from SAN? Although, technically you could just swap the drives.)


I use it pretty frequently. I also like the idea of policy based management and being able to manage 200 blades from a single interface without having to buy a manager of managers.

It's also pretty rad when you can sort your blades into different organizations and then apply permissions/policies. So if you have 100 blades you can give say 20 to dev, 30 to QA and the rest to production. Then the Dev/QA engineers could have total control over their blades without being able to mess around with production stuff.

Taking that one step further it opens up the option for production or QA or Dev to borrow resources back and forth without having to deal with re-installation/deployment if you don't want to.

It's also nice to pop in a new chassis then go click on your service profile template and tell it you want 8 more ESX servers configured in exactly the way you need. As an example our ESXi servers tend to have 6 NICs configured (lab machines with a pair of NICs on a standard switch, a pair on a dvSwitch and a pair on the Nexus 1000v) and our hyper-v systems only have 4.

I find UCSM is a lot friendlier when you have multiple administrators poking around doing stuff. If two people try to open a KVM console for the same blade it'll offer a chance to share it. Last time I dealt with Dell, HP and IBM they usually just said "sorry this is locked! try again later!" which was really frustrating when I was the one using it but my browser crashed from trying to use virtual media. This may have improved in recent versions. I haven't had a chance to touch that Dell M1000 in the lab.

quote:

It would be better to use NIOC.

I'd prefer real QoS to NIOC. Mostly by virtue of QoS being honored outside of the dvSwitch.

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